Tom Cruise Performs More Crazy Stunts in Mission: Impossible 5

In each Mission: Impossible movie, Tom Cruise seems to like to top whatever crazy stunt he performed in the one before it. Dangling from the side of the world's tallest building, Dubai's Burj Khalifa, in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol seemed pretty hard to top—terrestrially, anyway. Obviously once you've scaled the tallest building, if you still want to go up, you've got to dangle from an airplane. Or at least cling to one. And that's exactly what Cruise did last month while filming in the UK. ABC News reports (with pictures and video) that the 52-year-old actor had himself strapped to the side of an Airbus A4005 and clung to fuselage of the massive transport plane as it took off and reached an altitude of 5000 feet (putting him almost twice as high off the ground as he was in Dubai) at a speed of 340mph. So, yeah, maybe that tops running down the Burj Khalifa. And earlier today, according to the London Evening Standard, he filmed a chase scene in London's Piccadilly Circus shoving his way through real crowds. Okay, so that one's not quite as death-defying, but it does sound pretty harrowing if you happened to be stuck in traffic in the area. As previously reported, Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher) is directing, and Cruise is joined by returning team members Jeremy Renner (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, The Bourne Legacy), Simon Pegg (Mission: Impossible III and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) and (per Dark Horizons) Ving Rhames (veteran of all the Mission: Impossible films to date), along with newcomers to the series Rebecca Ferguson (The White Queen) and Alec Baldwin (The Hunt For Red October). Mission: Impossible 5 opens Christmas Day next year.

Additionally, The Mail Online posted this amateur video of the stunt in progress. (McQuarrie, obviously, will make it look considerably more exciting, no doubt with the aid of Lalo Schifrin's famous theme music!)